The first thing you notice when you step into Tamannaah Bhatia’s home isn’t the woman herself. It’s water. Not the rain lashing against the windows of her 14th floor apartment in Andheri West, Mumbai—though there is plenty of that on this rainy Tuesday evening. It’s the quiet hum of a large fish tank occupying the entrance, where two enormous gouramis glide unhurriedly. The sound from the bubbling fish tank somehow gives you the sense that water is everywhere in this house. The windows are open despite the rain, the wind sends the curtains and the edge of Tamannaah’s white dupatta billowing in slow waves. That might be the most filmi thing about her. Tamannaah, too, appears almost aqueous, dressed entirely in white, wearing no makeup, impossibly luminous, as though hydration were a philosophy rather than a skincare routine.
The apartment, which she shares with her parents, is elegant without trying too hard. White walls, clean lines, a wrap-around balcony, and light pouring into every room. But one object feels particularly revealing: a large piece of digital art hanging in the living room. From where I’m sitting, it resembles a Renaissance painting—orderly, classical, almost serene. Tamannaah urges me to step closer. Suddenly, the composition dissolves into glorious chaos: A winged angel sitting on a donkey. Women of Raja Ravi Varma scattered across the canvas, out of space and time. An Indian elephant with a man-monkey riding him. Spider-Man! A golden retriever. A bare-chested man with a deer head. A monkey reading a book? Another primate is being reined in by a snake charmer. “It’s a complete bhasad,” I say, delighted by its absurdity. She tells me she walked through a sprawling exhibition filled with artworks and instinctively chose this one. “To be honest,” she says, “I didn’t even know that you pick art.”
Gradually, I discover her other non-starry habits. One is that she texts back at lightning speed. “I think it’s more for my satisfaction. Sometimes, to be honest, if it’s not addressed in that period, you tend to forget,” she says matter-of-factly; the reasoning makes sense for someone juggling work in multiple film industries while setting up her own business. Maybe that’s the MO of someone who has spent two decades staying one step ahead.
Tamannaah didn’t come from a film family but she always knew she wanted to dance around trees. A school-going teen, she was spotted at her annual day function by a family friend and producer. She was smitten and stubborn—a lethal combination for a Mumbai girl. “I think I was very self-assured as a 14-year-old. I had this unbeatable faith and belief. I was very impulsive. I really didn’t have any patience. I wanted things to happen now,” she says.
Her filmography is the stuff that can make one’s head spin.
She started off as the lead in the now-forgettable Hindi film Chand Sa Roshan Chehra (2005), but offers from the south poured in quickly. Right after she started juggling Hindi and Telugu films, she winged a Tamil debut. In less than a decade, a Sindhi girl from Mumbai had become one of the popular stars of Telugu and Tamil cinema.
Happy Days (2007) and Kalloori (2007) made her a star. 100% Love (2011) was one of her most acclaimed performances. From Suriya to Karthi to Naga Chaitanya and Ram Charan, Tamannaah worked with every A-lister down south. All this before the SS Rajamouli blockbuster Baahubali: The Beginning (2015) with Prabhas made her a pan-India phenomenon. Which is to say, she is the sort of actor who has survived changing industries, changing beauty standards, changing audiences, and changing definitions of what a heroine is allowed to be.
Yet, despite all the reinventions, one thing remained constant. She never stopped dancing. It strikes me because somewhere along the way Hindi cinema quietly created a false binary: serious actresses don’t dance. But the lead heroines we grew up watching—Madhuri Dixit, Sridevi, Rekha—never paid heed to this distinction. They could command a frame with devastating dramatic precision before breaking into choreography that launched a thousand sangeets. Somewhere over the past two decades, those two qualities began drifting apart.
Tamannaah doesn’t believe they ever should have. “I feel like we’ve always been a musical culture. We love songs. But somewhere people started treating them as frivolous. Like they don’t require thought. Or effort. Or investment.”
She was never classically trained. Dancing, she says, became a survival skill. When she was a teenager working in the south, elaborate songs would arrive with impossibly little preparation. Sets had already been built. Hundreds of technicians were waiting. There wasn’t time to be intimidated. There was only time to learn. That pressure, she says, became her education. So, when she recently filmed the earworm ‘Ghafoor’ for Netflix’s The Ba***ds of Bollywood (2025), she approached it the only way she knew: “I had six hours of sleep,” she tells me, “I’d just finished shooting another song for Ranger. I didn’t even have time to rehearse, because I was rehearsing for that one.”
When conversation shifts to friendship, Farah Khan naturally enters it—not just as a choreographer but as her confidante. In an industry obsessed with hierarchy and lineage, Tamannaah’s girl gang is an unusually age-agnostic circle, with Khan (61) at one end and Rasha Thadani (21) at the other. “I started interacting with people for who they are, not what they do or where they come from. And I expect the same,” she says of her BFFs, which also include actor Mrunal Thakur and producer Pragya Kapoor.
Success, she stresses, isn’t what sustains friendships. Safety does. “When I feel like I can just be myself organically, then I become friends.” The schedules don’t matter. Fame doesn’t matter. Someone simply has to make time. “Mrunal calls me every Sunday just to check in. It’s her checking day. Sometimes I think we’re going to become that group of old people who keep calling each other.” There is something wonderfully ordinary about the image.
Tamannaah has never seemed interested in performing off camera. She has walked red carpets hand-in-hand with boyfriends and partners when she wanted to. The cameras adored it, the internet obsessed over it, and fans reacted as though they were witnessing something extraordinary. They weren't. They were simply watching a woman who had decided that love didn’t need to be hidden to be protected.
The same woman who turns heads on red carpets is perfectly content wandering around Mumbai in baggy jeans, oversized T-shirts, and oil in her hair. Beauty is a resource she deploys professionally but refuses to carry home. Much like her versatility in cinema, her brand endorsements, too, are wildly different: from Mysore Sandal Soap to Japanese luxury brand Shiseido.
Of course, brand endorsements today are as common as actors using their on-camera charisma to turn entrepreneurs and launching brands that feed off their image. Hrithik Roshan has HRX, Ranbir Kapoor has ARKS, Deepika Padukone, Kriti Sanon and Katrina helm beauty brands, while Energizer bunny Ranveer Singh has his line of protein bars. But Tamannaah is determined to push herself in unexpected directions.
Earlier this year, she launched her fine jewellery line Tamannaah Fine Jewellery. Her store occupies prime property on Mumbai’s plush Juhu Tara Road. She once told me, “Babe, just drop in. If I’m not shooting, I’m always there.”
Much like her tendency to surprise people in elevators with an unassuming ‘hello’, Tamannaah comes with a very hands-on founder energy—on her social media you’ll see her poring over mood boards and figuring her social media strategy herself. When I joke that she’s become her own intern, she laughs.
“I am my own intern,” she says, delighted enough by the phrase that she wants it printed on a T-shirt.
Building a business, she says, has fundamentally changed how she thinks. Every decision now demands a why. Not for herself but for the people she leads. She talks about solving the biggest problems first—a management principle sometimes called “killing the hostage”—before moving on to everything else.
She loves her fans but says she would hate for someone to buy her jewellery simply because she’s famous—the product has to earn its own place. There is, perhaps, something deeply Sindhi about that instinct. Commerce, for her, isn’t branding. It’s value, her diamond merchant father taught her. Why fine jewellery? “I’ve always been a muse. Acting is a collective effort. It’s someone else’s vision. But when you become a founder, you have that control. You can create products that become a part of people’s eternity, which is why I chose to do fine jewellery—it outlives you,” she says.
This year feels particularly special. It marks her 20 years in the industry. Tamannaah believes she is in what she calls the happiest phase of her life—spiritually, professionally, and physically. She has always been prolific, but now she has this infectious entrepreneur’s energy about her.
Earlier this year, the actor turned entrepreneur brought her obsession with design to screen while experimenting with a game-based mini-series, Everyone Can Design, featuring comedians like Rohan Joshi and Tanmay Bhatt. This month, she’s off to London to shoot Ragini MMS 3, and next month drops Vvan, a supernatural horror thriller from the Maddock Horror Comedy Universe. There’s also Ranger, an ensemble action film featuring Sanjay Dutt and Ajay Devgn, and a Tamil film called Purushan, besides a V Shantaram biopic, all planned for 2026.
All important things. But my mind has remains snagged on a sight I encountered on that wrap-around balcony an hour ago: a giant white jacuzzi. Does she actually use that? “It’s my wild fantasy,” she laughs. “I’ve used it,” she admits. “Very few times, though. I would like to use it more often. But I think I need company. Going in alone would be depressing.” Then she sheepishly adds, “The thing is, my father never says no to me. That’s actually my problem.” She throws up her hands in mock exasperation. “I sometimes ask him, ‘Why did you agree to this?’ This was the one thing you should have stopped me from doing.”
It’s impossible not to laugh.
“Supportive parents are not always a good thing!” For that 14-year-old who dreamed of dancing around trees, though, they must have been.
Editorial Direction: Megha Mahindru. Photography: Yii Oii. DOP: Jeff Wangyu. Fashion and Creative Direction: Priyanka Kapadia. Visual and Creative Direction: Jay Modi. Bookings Editor: Nikita Moses. Style Lead: Naheed Driver. Set Design: Preetesh Kushwaha. Multimedia Designer: Mehak Jindal. Visual Editor: Ria Rawat. Makeup: Sonam Sagar. Hair: Madhuri Nakhale. Assistant: Jean (Photo); Kashish Jain (Style). Production: Imran Khatri Production, Radhika Chemburkar, Vishal Baniya
